Just curious — could anyone explain the exact meaning of all the connection type symbols in iPhone?

Let's see, wifi and 3G, the fastest connection types, are quite clear, but how about the others: E is probably for EDGE (aka EGPRS), but what does the circle (O) mean? (2G something? GPRS? Or is the latter a higher-level concept in mobile data transfer?) EDGE is presumably the better of these two? (In practice I haven't noticed great difference as both are much slower than 3G.)

Finally, how do UMTS or W-CDMA fit in this picture? And if EDGE is a 3G technology too (as stated in Wikipedia), what kind of 3G technology exactly does iPhone's "3G" refer to?
(Also, please correct me if there are more than the four types I could remember.)

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I didn't migrate at first because the question was old and wasn't sure that it was still relevant, as there could still be a newer version of this question already on Apple.SE. Migrated anyhow. Cheers! :)
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studiohackAug 17 '11 at 14:21

Thanks for the authoritative reference! (To me it seems to be page 14 in the PDF.) Meaning of GPRS still isn't perfectly clear as Wikipedia says it's available in 2G and 3G systems en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Packet_Radio_Service — but I guess I'd need a degree in mobile telecommunication technology anyway to fully understand this multitude of standards. :-)
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JonikAug 18 '09 at 21:10

@Jonik - The Status Icons reference I looked at was on page 21. To be honest that was all I was looking for :)
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DiagoAug 18 '09 at 21:31

I'm not totally sure what the phone is doing exactly when using GPRS, but I can tell you from experience that the circle means the phone has a data connection, but it's too slow to be worth using. :)
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Electrons_AhoyAug 19 '09 at 2:59

@Jonik. It is actually possible. However there could be two signal charts in the manual, or we could just be using different page sizes. I do know Apple does do country redirection thought.
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DiagoAug 19 '09 at 11:58

It may be in the ITU 3G definitions, but that Wikipedia entry reads like propaganda. EDGE is typically referred to as "2.5G" (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5G for another perspective) by everyone else and does not require the UMTS technology to work.
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jrgAug 20 '09 at 22:08